Is there one universal PDF converter?

There are catalog pages, but the operations are different. Excel to PDF, PDF to JPG, PDF to text and PDF compression give different results and have different limits.

Which operations can run locally?

On pdfy, all of them: rotation, compression, PDF to JPG, PDF to text, Excel to PDF and page editing run in the browser. The file is not uploaded.

What about Word and PowerPoint?

They need a full office engine, so pdfy does not convert them. Save the file as PDF in Word or PowerPoint, then compress or edit it here.

Where should I start if I am not sure?

Open the PDF converter page and choose by input file: PDF, Excel, HTML or image. For a simple job, a specific tool is faster than a universal form.

Which PDF converter to use for Excel, text and images

document_final.pdf has to be "converted". Converted into what is the missing part. Accounting wants the text, marketing wants images for a product card, and the upload form wants the file under 5 MB. People call all of that a PDF converter. In practice, those are different operations with different ways to fail.

The catalog entry is here: PDF converter. After that, pick by input and output, not by the biggest button on the page.

PDF to text

PDF to text is for copying content and editing it somewhere else. It works with PDFs that already contain a text layer: contracts, instructions, proposals, reports exported from Word. Formatting is lost, but the text is ready to paste into an editor.

A quick check: can you select a line of text in the PDF viewer? If the whole page behaves like one image, it is a scan with no text layer, and the tool will tell you so.

Excel and HTML to PDF

Excel to PDF and HTML to PDF solve the opposite problem: freeze data so the recipient sees the same thing. The spreadsheet is built right in the browser: cell values are carried over, colors and merged cells are not. If the exact look matters, save the PDF from Excel itself.

Word and PowerPoint work the same way: File → Save As → PDF in the editor. Browsers are bad at recalculating fonts, line breaks, headers and slide sizes, so pdfy does not convert those files.

PDF to JPG

PDF to JPG is a different animal. The PDF does not need to be understood as an office document. It needs to be drawn as pages and saved as images. That fits the browser well: pdf.js reads pages, canvas draws, JPG downloads locally.

Use it for previews, chat messages, product cards, one-page instructions. Do not use it as an archive format for contracts or documents with links. After conversion, text is no longer selectable. It is just pixels.

Compression and rotation

Rotate PDF is the lightest operation. Often it only changes the /Rotate field, so the file does not need a full rebuild. That is why rotation is fast and local.

Compress PDF is messier. The browser recompresses images inside the file, and that is enough for many everyday scans. Text and vector graphics barely shrink: if the file is made of those, the tool says so.

My default choice

Need the text? PDF to text. Need to send a table with no surprises? Excel to PDF. Need an image? PDF to JPG. Upload form rejects the size? Compress. Scan is sideways? Rotate.

A universal PDF converter is useful as a map. The actual job should go through the specific tool that says what the operation cannot promise.